Archive for the ‘awesomeness’ Category
-
The Barn NY internship program: open call for Summer 2012
1st May 12
Posted in BBH, awesomeness
BBH NY's Barn Opens for Summer 2012
Author: Andy Ross, Account Manager, BBH NY
As the Winter 2012 Barn session came to a close with interns presenting digital platforms directly to UNICEF clients, something dawned upon us – we need to get the next round of the Barn rolling.
In short, the Barn is back. Please consider this your invite.
It goes like this: Two teams of three resourceful, slightly sleep-deprived interns compete against one another on a brief that belongs solely to them. They’ll also work on live projects within the walls of BBH and score some direct interaction with and mentorship from folks in nearly every department here, including BBH Labs.
The skills we’re looking for are varied, and none are mandatory – but guidelines might help. Do you know Final Cut Pro, PHP, C++? Ever heard of Open Source? Are you hyper-organized? Do you have a penchant for human behavior studies or a highly developed sense of smell that you have leveraged into a successful truffle company? Bottom line: we want people who can get things done.
Our role here is to empower you, not to ask you for coffee. That’s why previous Barn teams have managed to win everything from Lions to Pencils during their 10-week internship.
So you have it, the Barn’s hiring criteria are as follows: We want people who are good and nice. Apply at BBHBarn.com and follow @bbhbarn. Applications are due May 11th. We start June 4th, 2012. We cry that it’s over August 10th.
Good luck.
-
The Barn Returns: BBH NY’s 2012 Winter Term Internship Applications Are Open
15th January 12
Posted in awesomeness
The Barn is BBH's global internship program
Author: Eric Fernandez, Strategist, BBH New York
The Barn is back in New York, and we’re looking for a special new team of genius interns to fill our ranks. This isn’t your run of the mill ad internship, so we’re not looking for typical marketing resumes. We’re looking for resourceful MacGyver types who are curious about everything, comfortable doing stuff every day that they haven’t done before, and are natural wizards at technology. We want the kind of folks that can grasp a program like Final Cut Pro after watching a few how-to videos and a couple of hours of trial and error. Or, faced with the task of creating a web site, will google PHP programming, find some open source scripts and at least try to hack something together. When we say resourceful, we mean it. We’re looking for people that really geek out over their projects.The Barn is designed to empower people like this. We aren’t going to stick you under a rug doing nothing but grunt work. We are going to put you on teams and give you the chance to do your own projects. Last year, Barn Interns won two Cannes Lions with a project that was featured on major news outlets across the country– and even made Twitter’s ten most remarkable tweets of the year. That type of success continues to be our ambition in this now global internship program.
Our brief is three words: “Do Good, Famously” and we’ll give you the funding and support you need to create a kick ass project that will change lives. We’ll also make sure you get the credit for it. We want our program to be a spring board for your career.
If selected, you will be one of six interns, split into two teams of three people. These teams will be set off against their 3-word brief with full access to BBH talent along the way. They’ll also be working on client business throughout, so it will be a very busy 10 weeks. Our goal is to make this an internship like no other in marketing. It’s more about you than about us. We just like having your energy and passion around the agency. And if it’s anything like previous sessions, we’ll probably learn a thing or two ourselves.
If you’d like to apply or know some who would, check out the application site at http://www.bbhbarn.com/, or follow @bbhbarn. The application deadline ends January 20th, 2012. -
We Told Tales (at Internet Week)
2nd December 11
Posted in awesomeness
Author: James Mitchell, Strategist, BBH Labs
Back in November, Internet Week Europe happened – many of you might better know it as #iwe11. Last year, we challenged London’s digital elite to get their hands dirty and code up a storm in an afternoon. This year, we did something altogether more warm and fuzzy.
This November, we asked people to step forward and bare their souls for TaleTorrent – a night of true stories about the internet. And step forward they did! We had a truly fantastic lineup of speakers telling stories from the funny to the sad, the professional to the personal, but all extremely entertaining. Thank you guys, again.
It was very much a night run on volunteer goodwill – not least from the guys at Kinura, who approached us a full three days before the event and said “hey, d’you want us to stream it online?”
We said an emphatic yes. And so, for anybody that missed it, grab some port and enjoy after dinner.
TALETORRENT – PART ONE
Featuring @BetaRish and @mndtrythnkng‘s ultimate answer to Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?”,@katylindemann‘s True Confessions Of A Teenage Weblogger, @documentally‘s 999-style car crash reenactment, and @claireburge‘s paean to the gods of Serendipity.
TALETORRENT – PART TWO
Featuring @jnicholasgeist‘s Zombie apocalypse night-on-the-tiles (a transatlantic special!), @simonsanders‘ pen-pal to PM saga, @mananatomorrow‘s cyberphilic daughter, and my experiences of chartroom romance, of a sort.
…and if you enjoyed that, know now that there are plans for TaleTorrentTwo, to land sometime in March. A little less rushed this time around. Details will come when they exist, but if you’re inspired by what you’ve seen and you want to have a go, drop me an email at james.mitchell@bbh-labs.com. We’d love to have you.
-
SXSW 2012: What BBH is Planning & Why We Hope We’re Worth A Vote
17th August 11
Posted in awesomeness, sxsw
Photo by @saneel via @instagram, SxSW 2011
Although it seems insanely early every year, it’s time to start voting for panels at SxSW. Instead of spamming our professional and personal feeds with requests for support, we’re continuing a tradition we began last year of consolidating all of our potential panels into a single post.
So, if any of the below seems mildly interesting, we’d greatly appreciate a vote. All of the summaries below click-thru to the appropriate panel picker page at sxsw.com. Regardless, we’re quite excited to attend to hear what others have to say. We value the experience every year, and as always we digest everything with the benefit of context you all as the loyal Labs community provide us.
Skynet vs. Mad Max: Battle for the Future
In this session, our own Mel Exon (@melex) and Google’s Tom Uglow (@tomux) will discuss two possible futures of the web:
- A highly controlled algorithm-driven web where people and brands are matched perfectly via formula and AI, in a spam-free nirvana.
- An ongoing battle of people and brands seeking to be discovered, creating an open web with neutral techn partners and real-world spaces where tech doesn’t penetrate.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
Chief Innovation Officers Defend Their Titles
The topic of this panel was born of conversation frequently discussed on our blog in 2011: do agencies really need someone to run innovation? In this session four innovation leaders, including our Saneel Radia (@saneel) and Labs founder (now client at Google Creative Lab) Ben Malbon (@malbonnington), will answer hard questions about the value of such a role, what it actually entails, and what makes a good candidate to play the part. The panel also includes Edward Boches of Mullen (@edwardboches), Dave Armano of Edelman (@armano) and David Erixon (@dexodexo), founder of Hyper Island.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
The South By Shark Tank: Pitch Your Big Idea
This panel features Neil Munn, Global Head of BBH Zag, along with other ad industry investment professionals. In this session, the audience is invited to present their elevator pitches and receive high-level advice on how to prime the proposals for investment. Press coverage for the most attractive investments is built in via our friends at PSFK (@psfk).
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
BBH planner Tim Jones (@timjonestweet) will outline “gaming brands,” an approach to brand strategy built on gaming principles. This approach represents a fundamental shift from building brands as message transmission devices, to building brands as behaviour change systems. This talk will feature new material built on content Tim previously covered in his TEDx talk of the same name.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
Your Story Sucks! Saving Story in the Digital Age
In this session, three BBH storytellers (including @jamescmitchell, @writingstudio, and @depechetoad) from different backgrounds share the results of in-field storywriting experiments from standup to novel-writing to radio plays to alternate reality games. They’ve tried it all, and are going to try and explain what works. This is not a panel – think of it as a three-man show. This is a theoretical session, with practical homework.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
My Mom Plays That: How Women Game-Change Gaming
As women play casual games in ever-increasing numbers, this session will examine what this means for the development of casual and traditional games. It will specifically look at how the psychology of women influences the psychology of game developers. The purpose of this presentation by BBH social media manager Claire Coady (@claire_coady) is to examine how women are influencing the seismic shifts underway across the gaming landscape.
Find out more, vote and add your support here.
-
The Barn’s Back: Perspective on BBH NYC Internships
19th November 10
Posted in awesomeness
Author: Heidi Hackemer (@uberblond), Strategy Director, BBH NYC
Well, here we go again.
This past summer we tried a little intern experiment at BBH New York called the Barn (and actually wrote our very first post about the idea here).
The Barn is all about trying new ways of working and finding new solutions to old problems. We bring in six interns, put them in teams and give them a problem to solve. A tough problem. A problem that requires moxy and guts. Last summer it was “Here’s $1000, make something famous” and the funny thing is, through a great idea, lots of work and some wicked use of the web, one team actually did.
The upshot is that we had a great summer and in the true spirit of beta and chaos, we learned a lot. So we’re going to do it again. Want to apply? You can do it here.
In the meantime, we asked one of our Barn’ers from last summer, Daniel Edmundson, to outline what the Barn was all about and what he learned. His rather astute thoughts are below:
The following Barnisms, we believe, provide a valid offering of the Barn experience. As the industry moves toward a more hybrid model in mentality, specialty and creative sheen (see: Voltron), individuals with little to no experience in the ad world can contribute some pretty weird and crazy ideas while embracing the truths of technology, brands and businesses.
Here’s what we gleaned:
People are smart and all, but it’s nothing if you’re not nice.
Folks at BBH go by this axiom, and it can at first be daunting to accept. There is an innate inferiority to the intern experience, and it’s not easy to shake. But the Barn was built on the idea of integration within the agency–not just integration by discipline and interest, but by collaboration and lending new thoughts.
For us, it was as basic a learning as knowing it’s cool to pitch your early ideas to one of the creative teams, or discuss ongoing strategy with top planners. It was about access to smarts, and being comfortable saying, “I need your brain.”
Be clear. Very, very clear.
At a time when our social lives are as open and transparent as a storefront window, our communications, we learned, must follow suit. When members of the media or the ad community challenged the social relevancy and sincerity of the projects we were executing, we were immediately honest about our motivations and our associations to BBH. Not only did it help us to move forward to better develop the idea, it got the subject out early and placed the focus back on what was important.
Feed feed feed.
When consumers commit to a brand or platform, they formulate expectations.And with the brevity and ubiquity of stuff today, those expectations need to be forthright and on schedule—they must live and operate as their character does.
We learned that, especially when making a chronological or episodic product (say, 30 dates/30 days or a constant cookie delivery), content must deliver on that promise. The market, particularly online, is one big ocean of fishes and underwater activity—there are sharks that are hungry for new feed all the time. It’s important to keep them full.
Build dynamics from those around you.
Little was more important than realizing the crazy importance of working in a team. Put together at the start of 10 weeks with complete strangers, we had to recognize strengths early, put egos aside and move very quickly to process ideas.
Most importantly, it was designing a system with the insurmountable intelligence that we had on hand to make things happen.
Become a community manager.
Whether it was living in the online space or in the physical, both teams had to pay careful attention to what was being voiced and how to respond. As we developed each project monitoring feedback and reacting quickly became paramount—even more so, understanding how particular channels consumed and reacted to the bits of information informed our output as we moved along.
Understand and do timely collaboration.
Make it messy. Curate timelines for concepts to enter in and out, and bring everybody in. Collaboration should be like a big party, with everyone invited and all ideas honorable. The Barn is an incubator for collaboration—but it needs to be controlled and relevant to real-world happenings and interactions, or else it could be DOA.
Speak many languages, and carry a big idea.
Everyone in the Barn came from disparate backgrounds and it was very easy to simplify being very good at one thing. Whether it was coding, filming or writing copy, it was imperative that we leaned on other efficiencies to make each project work. The idea ran faster, operated better and was more agile with the distribution of skills and resources.
Question culture.
You must be curious, and you must ask why (or why not). This goes both for the culture within the wooden walls of the Barn, as well as outside in the fields and world-at-large. Be all, WTF about the workings of things, the lives of people and the wherewithal of ideas. Well-traveled—physically and mentally.
It’s like championing @kanyewest, AND questioning if the @John_Hegarty Twitter handle was a genuine or a fraud.
Beta can save your life, and your livelihood.
As many in the ad world can attest, it’s simply our nature to constantly massage, tinker with and hold close the ideas that are meant for the world. Getting them out into the real world early and often (half-dressed and really ugly, even) can pay off and help to shape the route towards the road ahead.
Make friends, be human.
While brands and businesses are trying so hard to be all the more human (and their agencies doing some of the handholding and small talking along the way), we forget too often that we, too, should do the same. Many in the Barn joined the soccer team, celebrated camaraderie with fellow black sheep and spent quality time with our mentors, all in the hope of forming a strong kinship with the offices. It worked. So much of BBH (and I’d hope the world) is about the people you work with; it’s about getting to know them and how they’re a genius at everything.
(Internships start in January. Apply here.)
-
Old Record Player + Stop Motion + Lights + Tron Legacy Soundtrack = Awesome
20th September 10
Posted in awesomeness, technology
This is great. Almost too great to be true. But take a look and see what you think. Hot on the heels of Dentsu London’s clever use of the iPad to paint pictures, something altogether more lofi but equally excellent.
Light Drive from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.
Stop motion form and colour, using light painting techniques.
Lighting: Kim Pimmel
Sound: Tron Legacy trailers—
From Kim Pimmel’s Vimeo site, more detail:
I’ve been interested in taking my Light Study photo series and evolving them into motion pieces. I shot a lot of footage for a VJ gig for FITC San Francisco. So I edited together those stop motion sequences, mashed up some audio from the Tron Legacy trailers, and out came Light Drive.
The video is stop motion, so every frame is an individually shot photograph. Each photograph is a long exposure photo, with exposures reaching up to 20 seconds in some cases.
To control the lights, I used an Arduino controlled via bluetooth to drive a stepper motor. The stepper motor controls the movements of the lights remotely from Processing.
The light sources include cold cathode case lights, EL wire, lasers and more.
—
via @finnbarrw (the constant source of the most magical films and special effects)
-
Pac-Man Performed in Stop-Motion with Humans as Pixels
10th September 10
Posted in awesomeness
This is fun. Albeit slightly pointless fun.
The latest in our recent series of brilliant non-digital awesomeness (see also the incredible projection show in Kharkov & Target’s spectacular light show at the Standard Hotel in NYC).
French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond created this stop-motion video showing Pac-Man being played at a movie theater in Switzerland last month. The project had 111 patient volunteers sit, shift, and change shirts over the course of more than four hours.
This is the fifth video in Reymond’s GAME OVER project, in which he recreates classic arcade games with humans as pixels. See more here (including Pong, Space Invaders & Tetris).
(via Laughing Squid, Peta Pixel & Finnbarr Webster)
-
Like this – Bob Dylan ‘demos’ Google Instant
8th September 10
Posted in awesomeness, online video
More kudos to the folks at Google’s Creative Lab for this short film.
And here’s a little more info on Instant, if Bob’s demo leaves you slightly confused. Apparently Google Instant will save 350 million hours of user time per year.
-
The End of The Beginning – Ben’s move to Google Creative Lab
27th August 10
Posted in awesomeness
- “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
~Sir Winston Churchill, November 1942
- So you will have heard Ben is leaving the BBH fold after six or so years, to take up the role of Director of Strategy, Google Creative Lab. Anyone who knows Ben knows this is exactly the kind of role he was built for: at the cutting edge, challenging-as-hell, massive in scope. It’s a huge job at one of the world’s most exciting companies – to say we’re extremely excited for him is a massive understatement. In fact, perhaps you’d expect us to say this – BBH do work with Google on a range of projects, after all – but the truth is Ben has developed an extraordinary relationship between Google and BBH, going back five years to our original assignment with Google (in which the very first slide of the presentation read: ‘We Don’t Want To Be Your Ad Agency’). We’re happy he’ll still be part of that team, albeit client-side from now on.
- I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunities for all of us who know Ben to wax lyrical about his cyborgian ability to work harder and longer than most sentient beings on the planet; his obsessive playing of Kraftwerk and Prince (for decades on end); his incisive mind and brutally funny wit; his energy, talent and relentless dedication to creativity in all its forms; his ability to multi-task (I don’t know anyone else who can simultaneously email me a keynote deck for comments, send a link to yet another YouTube mashup, tweet his boundless joy at finally becoming the Mayor of Columbine, eat a sandwich – 1/2 chipotle roasted chicken, 1/2 flank steak w/ red onions – from the same establishment… all whilst talking to me on Skype) for Britain and NYC combined. However, this is my opportunity to say a few words briefly, so please bear with me for another sentence or two.
- Ben is quite simply the best partner I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. We began BBH Labs back in 2008 with a half-baked business plan, a blind faith in one another and the desire to disrupt. For my part, I figured if you’re going to take a risk like set up a unit like Labs, then better do it with someone you like and respect. I knew I had a partner who’d be fearless, inquisitive and challenging; who’d push me and support me in the same breath.
- Maybe the definition of a great partner is someone who helps you to be the best you can be. I could add, who does so without driving you insane. Truth is, we’ve had our moments. But in the main we’ve got through it and, I think, come out stronger.
- Looking to the immediate future, Ben has a month or so before his time at BBH and Labs ends and his new role begins. I hope he’s going to relax, take a deep breath and enjoy himself. I’m sure we’ll know about it if he does. For anyone curious to know, I will continue to run Labs in London – and we’re fortunate insofar as BBH is packed with people around the world willing and able to get involved. More on this another day.
- For now, we simply want to wish Ben the very best of luck at Google. They’re lucky to have him.
- Mel
- “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
-
Beautiful Film of The Day – Giant Stinson Beach Bubbles (Canon 550D)
24th August 10
Posted in awesomeness
Posted by: Seth Weisfeld, Digital Creative Director, BBH New York (follow him at @seth_weisfeld)
As the summer begins to fade in our minds on a rainy day like this, its all too easy to forget the simple joys of a day at the beach. This film is a lovely reminder and shot and scored very beautifully. Enjoy.
Be sure to watch in HD, full screen. Even more stunning.
Recent comments: